Musings from the road: 60 days! before the Boston Marathon.
Here’s a snippet of a post from last year at this time. Mid-February:
“My right leg, still tender, if I didn’t know better I’d be thinking blood clot, the pain is so sharp at times, but I’ve done my bit, stretched and strengthened like never before, and as I head out again – six-miler, easy pace, fifty/fifty-five minutes – right away feel the inner-thigh muscle tighten, not easing as it always does, it’s the cold, I tell myself as I slow down, listen to my body, as the running mavens say, and the muscle holds in its tightness; a drummer knowing the tone of the bass drum is off, the tension too tight, but not so that I can’t get through the set. I need this gig. It's Week One, and the show, if there is going to be the show in April, must go on.”
Running for Your Life: Chasing the February Blahs
What is it about February? Even this one, a third over and temperatures have been closer to 50s than even 40s. Not balmy, of course .¤.¤. For the past three months not able to go out the door in anything but an overcoat of some kind; this uniform that we all wear: the navys and blacks and charcoal grays, in New York commuting for as often as I do the subway company I keep more funeral parlor than rumpus room.
Why do we grow up and into these Beckettian uniforms from the primary colors of kindergarten? (As a toddler I had a smashing ruby red shorts and harness outfit that I wore when tooling around on my fire-engine red tricycle .¤.¤. Now I don’t even own a stitch of clothing that’s red.)
Why do we grow up and into these Beckettian uniforms from the primary colors of kindergarten? (As a toddler I had a smashing ruby red shorts and harness outfit that I wore when tooling around on my fire-engine red tricycle .¤.¤. Now I don’t even own a stitch of clothing that’s red.)
Running for Your Life: Notes from the Long Ones
Marathon training – now up to 38-plus miles per week – tests your mind as well as your body. On my runs through Brooklyn and Manhattan, especially on the one day a week that I put on extra miles (this week I’m up to 14 miles per long run; I plan to bump that up a mile or so every week for the next eight weeks before Boston), I see the darnedest things:
On Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn at about 22nd Street, a modest two-story whose shoulder-height eaves are post-holiday decorated with several incredibly lifelike icicles that only reveal themselves as fakes under close inspection.
In Brooklyn Heights, a skinny girl with long hair struggling to carry a Zappos box that’s half her size.
On Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn at about 22nd Street, a modest two-story whose shoulder-height eaves are post-holiday decorated with several incredibly lifelike icicles that only reveal themselves as fakes under close inspection.
In Brooklyn Heights, a skinny girl with long hair struggling to carry a Zappos box that’s half her size.
Running for Your Life: Training, A Recap
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the body. Not in a Golden Globe kind of way, though. As in how fabulous Jane Fonda looks or get a load of Angelina Jolie’s bone-thin arms; the supermarket tabs really do have it right, she must be starving herself, the camera cutaway to hubbie Brad, train-seal clapping at his waste-away woman.
No, the body as vessel. Something that you think you know, but is more than likely a stranger to you. It is most common to just go along doing the same things to our bodies and they, of course, do what comes naturally: adding a pound or two each year after twenty-five so that a 120-pound woman at a quarter-century is a normal-enough-looking 155-pound woman at a half-century. BMI (Body Mass Index not fab, but not obese either .¤.¤.)
No, the body as vessel. Something that you think you know, but is more than likely a stranger to you. It is most common to just go along doing the same things to our bodies and they, of course, do what comes naturally: adding a pound or two each year after twenty-five so that a 120-pound woman at a quarter-century is a normal-enough-looking 155-pound woman at a half-century. BMI (Body Mass Index not fab, but not obese either .¤.¤.)
Running for Your Life: Key West Beat
Back from Key West, the Conch Republic, where the captains who run the sunset sails thrill their predominantly Boomer fare with the knee-slapper, “Welcome to North Cuba!”, upon return in the darkness because for most of us land lubbers it’s more than a little disorienting out there, for an hour out of the sandbank and mangrove low-water keys, the Gulf Stream visible the night we see the sun sink into the horizon and the captain blows the conch so that his face glows purple in contrast to the blood-orange of the sunset, all aboard the AppleBone, as poet Billy Collins dubbed it, because it was a literary cruise, not like the Disney one, a floating theme park that moored near our oceanfront balcony, ESPN Sports Center on a giant screen topside blaring into the otherwise romantic night; shallow draught Caribbean port bruisers these beasts; how they get into the slips with water deep as elderly knickers is anybody’s guess, and a frightening thought that the town fathers have been considering allowing 10,000-passenger monsters into port (although the Italian cruise disaster may put an end to that . . .), which if that doesn’t kill whatever charm north to central Duval Street has left then I’m a monkey’s uncle, not to mention the safety of the cruise ships themselves, don’t begin to think that the capsizing of the Costa Concordia is an anomaly, the physics of these boats leaving no margin for error, turn away if you see the chalkboard math on the probability of it happening again, and especially in a place like Key West, where you do have to ask the question, “Well, how many people can drown in two feet of water?”
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